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The Gunpowder Genie [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-10-27  

The Nuclear Genie was a phrase that was invented to sardonically describe the atomic weapons arms race: once you release it, you can never put the nuclear genie back in the bottle. I say sardonically because this particular genie cannot grant any wish but death.

At the time of writing of this post, the active shooter in Maine has not yet been located. But the immediate response of many Republicans was (I paraphrase) “if more citizens had guns, this tragedy would have ended sooner”. I call nuclear bullshit upon that idea because, against the will of the majority of Americans, that experiment has been tried: every mass shooting, every school massacre, every murder suicide in recent times has been met with the loosening of restrictions on guns with a very few mild exceptions. Have the shootings stopped? Of course not, they have accelerated.

But behind the heinous social experiment (that unlimited number and strength of guns will improve life) is an even bigger lie. The gun supporters claim that there is a Gunpowder Genie just like the nuclear one that can never be put back in the bottle. “There are too many guns out there, we could never eliminate them.” How did we become the most gun saturated country in the world (120 guns per 100 people in the U.S., followed by 52 per 100 in Yemen — a lovely safe place to spend your vacation!) if not by the aforementioned social experiment? By the unbridled greed and unmatched influence of the gun industry on our government?

Here is the truth: we could regulate guns down to a sane level if we wanted to. Britain and Japan, to name two industrialized nations, have 3.5 and .16(!) guns per 100 people, achieved through strict legislative control. And Japan had only 9 gun deaths in 2019, half of the number of people who have died in the Maine shootings so far. I believe that this evil genie can be put back into its bottle. Prove me wrong, we’ve already tried the opposite at the cost of 50,000 dead Americans each year.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/27/2202018/-The-Gunpowder-Genie?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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